The Missing Link in Workforce Wellness: Elevating Spiritual Care to Strategic Priority

Healthcare organizations struggle with workforce distress, with burnout, moral injury and emotional exhaustion driving turnover, reducing quality of care and undermining organizational resilience. Many systems have implemented wellness programs, and some have effectively integrated spiritual care as a strategic asset in supporting the emotional and existential needs of staff.

This session explores the innovative role of spiritual care providers—often called chaplains—in designing and delivering targeted interventions that reduce burnout and promote well-being among healthcare teams. Drawing from real-world case studies, existing literature and evidence-based practices, this session will offer healthcare executives practical insights about how to leverage spiritual care to support individual clinicians and enhance team culture, build psychological safety and align with broader organizational goals.

You will learn how spiritual care professionals assess workforce distress, develop responsive interventions (such as structured group debriefs, formal unit-based interventions and one-on-one support), and collaborate across disciplines to embed meaning, purpose and connection into the clinical environment. The session will discuss the measurable impacts seen in the literature and in practice—making the case for spiritual care as a high-value, low-cost component of workforce strategy. The session will offer guidance on how to position spiritual care within executive-level priorities and leave with practical tools for launching or scaling interventions that heal the healers—and strengthen the system as a whole. Whether your organization currently uses spiritual care providers or you are considering adding to your team, this workshop will provide the critical considerations on how to improve spiritual care providers' integration and their unique skill sets.